SAN MATEO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/22/14 -- StrongLoop, the leading provider of solutions for Node.js, today announced the immediate availability of the StrongLoop API Server which makes it easy for developers to rapidly develop, deploy, secure and scale REST APIs written in Node. The ubiquity of mobile devices along with the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving a huge need for APIs that can connect devices to new and legacy data. Node has emerged as the technology of choice for creating these APIs because of its asynchronous design and the ability for developers to rapidly code using their existing skillset in JavaScript. Node's development speed has been embraced by large companies such as PayPal, Condé Nast, Dow Jones and Yahoo.

Announcing the StrongLoop API Server

The StrongLoop API Server is a set of components that work together to quickly take your API project from development to production. Features include:

LoopBack 2.0: An open source framework for quickly creating APIs with Node. LoopBack includes client SDKs.

mobile Backend-as-a-Service: An mBaaS to provide mobile services like push, offline-sync, geopoint and social login either on-premise or in the cloud.

Monitoring: A hosted or on-premise graphical console for monitoring resource utilization, response times and function tracing with the ability to send metrics to existing monitoring tools.

For an in-depth walk through of the StrongLoop API Server, watch this video with StrongLoop CTO, Al Tsang.

StrongLoop API Server is built on top of LoopBack 2.0

Released today is version 2.0 of the LoopBack API framework. LoopBack is an open source framework sponsored by StrongLoop that acts as a "glue" between apps or devices and data via APIs written in Node. New in this release are improvements the community and customers have been clamoring for:

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Studio: Many users have asked for a graphical interface to complement the command-line tooling when building Loopback models. We are proud to announce that we have started development on a UI for modeling called, "Studio." You can watch a preview demo here.

Yeoman and Grunt support: Users told us they needed to scaffold applications and externalize their configurations for multiple environments using the tools they are familiar with. So, we've added support for Yeoman and Grunt to make easier to perform task scripting, scaffolding and templating.

Express 4.0 support: ExpressJS is one of the most well known packages for Node.js. It is a web development framework that helps us create the great applications. It is also the E in the MEAN stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, Node.js). Express 4.0 brought improvements by removing bundled middleware and refactoring them into maintainable modules, revamped router to remove confusion on HTTP verb (.use, .get, etc) usage and decoupling Connect, the HTTP framework of Node from the Express web framework.

New project structure: the LoopBack directory structure has been expanded to make it easier to organize apps and add functionality via pre-built LoopBack components and Node modules.

Workspace API and Boot: The latest release of LoopBack comes with a newly re-designed internal API making it easier to define, configure, and bootstrap your application at design time and runtime by simply defining metadata in the form of JSON.

To learn more about the new Loopback 2.0 release, please read the announcement blog from StrongLoop CTO, Al Tsang.

Products built with Node expertise

StrongLoop doesn't just build products with Node, it is the biggest contributor to the project. Co-founded in 2013 by core committers Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis, StrongLoop now employs the most developers actively contributing to Node. With over 420 commits and 630,000 lines of code, StrongLoop is the largest individual and corporate sponsor of Node employing 5 of the top 10 developers on the project. StrongLoop's expertise leverages this expertise with a full complement of training, support, certification and consulting offerings.

Launched in 2013 and based in Silicon Valley, StrongLoop was founded by engineers who have been contributing to Node.js since 2011. The company is backed by Ignition Partners and Shasta Ventures and includes Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus (previously MySQL) as an advisor. StrongLoop is the leading contributor to the latest Node.js v0.12 release. The primary use case for Node.js is creating APIs that mobile applications connect to in order to retrieve backend information. StrongLoop offers the StrongLoop API Server which makes it fast to develop APIs in Node and includes client SDKs, a modeling studio, built-in tools for mobile services, offline sync, connectivity to enterprise datasources plus monitoring and scaling. StrongLoop runs on all major operating systems and clouds including Amazon, Heroku, OpenShift and Digital Ocean. For more information, visit http://strongloop.com.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet Performance, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Dyn is a cloud-based Internet Performance company. Dyn helps companies monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure for an exceptional end-user experience. Through a world-class network and unrivaled, objective intelligence into Internet conditions, Dyn ensures traffic gets delivered faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.

Skytap Inc., has appointed David Frost as vice president of professional services. David joins Skytap from Deloitte Consulting where he served as Managing Director leading SAP, Cloud, and Advanced Technology Services. At Skytap, David will head the company's professional services organization, and spearhead a new consulting practice that will guide IT organizations through the adoption of DevOps best practices. David's appointment comes on the heels of Skytap's recent $35 million Series D funding announcement, and record growth in 2014.

Business and IT leaders today need better application delivery capabilities to support critical new innovation. But how often do you hear objections to improving application delivery like, “I can harden it against attack, but not on this timeline”; “I can make it better, but it will cost more”; “I can deliver faster, but not with these specs”; or “I can stay strong on cost control, but quality will suffer”? In the new application economy, these tradeoffs are no longer acceptable. Customers will abandon your brand forever for a slow response or a privacy breach; competitors will steal critical ...

Red Hat has launched the Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice, a new global team of experts that will assist companies with more quickly on-ramping to the cloud. They will do this by providing solutions and services such as validated designs with reference architectures and agile methodology consulting, training, and support.
The Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice is born out of the integration of technology and engineering expertise gained through the company’s 2014 acquisitions of leading Ceph storage system provider, Inktank, and cloud computing services provider, eNovance. Both companies pro...

DevOps is about increasing efficiency, but nothing is more inefficient than building the same application twice. However, this is a routine occurrence with enterprise applications that need both a rich desktop web interface and strong mobile support. With recent technological advances from Isomorphic Software and others, it is now feasible to create a rich desktop and tuned mobile experience with a single codebase, without compromising performance or usability.

The speed of software changes in growing and large scale rapid-paced DevOps environments presents a challenge for continuous testing. Many organizations struggle to get this right. Practices that work for small scale continuous testing may not be sufficient as the requirements grow.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Marc Hornbeek, Sr. Solutions Architect of DevOps continuous test solutions at Spirent Communications, will explain the best practices of continuous testing at high scale, which is relevant to small scale DevOps, and if there is an expectation of growth as the number of build targe...

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...

SYS-CON Events announced today Arista Networks will exhibit at SYS-CON's DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Arista Networks was founded to deliver software-driven cloud networking solutions for large data center and computing environments. Arista’s award-winning 10/40/100GbE switches redefine scalability, robustness, and price-performance, with over 3,000 customers and more than three million cloud networking ports deployed worldwide.

Application metrics, logs, and business KPIs are a goldmine. It’s easy to get started with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) – you can see lots of people coming up with impressive dashboards, in less than a day, with no previous experience. Going from proof-of-concept to production tends to be a bit more difficult, unfortunately, and it tends to gobble up our attention, time, and money.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Otis Gospodnetić, co-author of Lucene in Action and founder of Sematext, will share the architecture and decisions behind Sematext’s services for handling larg...

The speed of product development has increased massively in the past 10 years. At the same time our formal secure development and SDL methodologies have fallen behind. This forces product developers to choose between rapid release times and security.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Michael Murray, Director of Cyber Security Consulting and Assessment at GE Healthcare, examined the problems and presented some solutions for moving security into the DevOps lifecycle to ensure that we get fast AND secure.

Docker is becoming very popular--we are seeing every major private and public cloud vendor racing to adopt it. It promises portability and interoperability, and is quickly becoming the currency of the Cloud.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, discussed why Docker is so important to the future of the cloud, but will also take a step back and show that Docker is actually only one piece of the puzzle. Copeland will outline the bigger picture of where Docker fits and the remaining infrastructure that is needed for large scale adoption by enterprise IT.

Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker.
Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.

Security can create serious friction for DevOps processes. We've come up with an approach to alleviate the friction and provide security value to DevOps teams.
In her session at DevOps Summit, Shannon Lietz, Senior Manager of DevSecOps at Intuit, will discuss how DevSecOps got started and how it has evolved.
Shannon Lietz has over two decades of experience pursuing next generation security solutions. She is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s cloud security strategy, roadmap and implementation in support of corporate innova...

In his session at DevOps Summit, Tapabrata Pal, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Capital One, will tell a story about how Capital One has embraced Agile and DevOps Security practices across the Enterprise – driven by Enterprise Architecture; bringing in Development, Operations and Information Security organizations together. Capital Ones DevOpsSec practice is based upon three "pillars" – Shift-Left, Automate Everything, Dashboard Everything. Within about three years, from 100% waterfall, Capital One now has 500+ Agile Teams delivering quality software via Agile and DevOps practices.

In his session at DevOps Summit, Tapabrata Pal, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Capital One, will tell a story about how Capital One has embraced Agile and DevOps Security practices across the Enterprise – driven by Enterprise Architecture; bringing in Development, Operations and Information Security organizations together. Capital Ones DevOpsSec practice is based upon three "pillars" – Shift-Left, Automate Everything, Dashboard Everything. Within about three years, from 100% waterfall, Capital One now has 500+ Agile Teams delivering quality software via Agile and DevOps practices.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a technology designed to make DevOps easier and allow developers to focus on application development. The PaaS takes care of provisioning, scaling, HA, and other cloud management aspects. Apache Stratos is a PaaS codebase developed in Apache and designed to create a highly productive developer environment while also supporting powerful deployment options.
Integration with the Docker platform, CoreOS Linux distribution, and Kubernetes container management system brings more scalability and flexibility to Apache Stratos PaaS.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo,...

VictorOps is making on-call suck less with the only collaborative alert management platform on the market.
With easy on-call scheduling management, a real-time incident timeline that gives you contextual relevance around your alerts and powerful reporting features that make post-mortems more effective, VictorOps helps your IT/DevOps team solve problems faster.

Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, will discuss why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rather than mimicking legacy server virtualization workflows and architectures.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Open Data Centers (ODC), a carrier-neutral colocation provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Open Data Centers is a carrier-neutral data center operator in New Jersey and New York City offering alternative connectivity options for carriers, service providers and enterprise customers.

The cloud has transformed how we think about software quality. Instead of preventing failures, we must focus on automatic recovery from failure. In other words, resilience trumps traditional quality measures.
Continuous delivery models further squeeze traditional notions of quality. Remember the venerable project management Iron Triangle? Among time, scope, and cost, you can only fix two or quality will suffer.
Only in today's DevOps world, continuous testing, integration, and deployment upend the time metric, the DevOps cadence reinvents project scope, and cost metrics expand past software ...

Between the compelling mockups and specs produced by your analysts and designers, and the resulting application built by your developers, there is a gulf where projects fail, costs spiral out of control, and applications fall short of requirements.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, will present a new approach where business and development users collaborate – each using tools appropriate to their goals and expertise – to build mockups and enhance them all the way through functional prototypes, to final working applications. Lea...

Security can create serious friction for DevOps processes. We've come up with an approach to alleviate the friction and provide security value to DevOps teams.
In her session at DevOps Summit, Shannon Lietz, Senior Manager of DevSecOps at Intuit, will discuss how DevSecOps got started and how it has evolved.
Shannon Lietz has over two decades of experience pursuing next generation security solutions. She is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s cloud security strategy, roadmap and implementation in support of corporate innova...

Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker.
Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of being reserved to the largest, most complex application stacks.

Software is eating the world. Companies that were not previously in the technology space now find themselves competing with Google and Amazon on speed of innovation. As the innovation cycle accelerates, companies must embrace rapid and constant change to both applications and their infrastructure, and find a way to deliver speed and agility of development without sacrificing reliability or efficiency of operations.
In her Day 2 Keynote DevOps Summit, Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell, discussed how IT organizations can automate just-in-time assembly of application environments - each built fo...

DevOps tends to focus on the relationship between Dev and Ops, putting an emphasis on the ops and application infrastructure. But that’s changing with microservices architectures.
In her session at DevOps Summit, Lori MacVittie, Evangelist for F5 Networks, will focus on how microservices are changing the underlying architectures needed to scale, secure and deliver applications based on highly distributed (micro) services and why that means an expansion into “the network” for DevOps.

The challenge facing today’s project management professionals is supporting a more agile approach to software releases while managing orderly governance and production controls that are necessary. Project managers have become air traffic controllers landing more projects more frequently on more runways, and as the skies become more crowded it’s important to understand both the trends and some strategies for managing the increasingly agile enterprise.

Our guest on the podcast this week is Mark Thiele, EVP of Data Center Technology at Switch.
We discuss the idea that private clouds are often equated with do-it-yourself and why that should be changed.
Taking sure you are receiving the private environment you need at a cost that can support your business.
Listen in to learn the different ways to own and manage a private cloud.

DevOps is an approach that improves collaboration among Dev and Ops teams to enable fast delivery of applications and ensure impeccable end-user experience. BizDevOps takes the concept of DevOps to a new level – by bringing the business context and insights to day to day DevOps activities. BizDevOps ensures that Dev and Ops focus on what matters to the business and also introduces the Biz persona (line-of-business manager, product manager) as a key stakeholder in the process.
IDC recently pub...

It’s easy to fall into a pattern of dysfunctional releases, release processes that are characterized by delay, inefficiency, and endless meetings that encourage people to view releases as a problem. These are the kinds of meetings that inspire references to the movie Office Space or emails that include clippings of the cartoon Dilbert - repetitive meetings to answer the same questions over and over again all because people lack the tools to connect the issue tracker with the change management sy...

In my first blog I wrote about SharePoint System Performance Health Checks beyond looking at CPU and Memory Metrics. In this blog, I cover deployment related performance health problems that I always check when looking at a SharePoint Installation. Especially after deploying new hardware, new sites, pages, views, custom or third-party Web Parts (e.g., from AvePoint, K2, Nintex, Metalogix, etc.) it’s important to perform certain deployment sanity checks. While you may have nobody reporting issues...

Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch ...

Application metrics, logs, and business KPIs are a goldmine. It’s easy to get started with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) – you can see lots of people coming up with impressive dashboards, in less than a day, with no previous experience. Going from proof-of-concept to production tends to be a bit more difficult, unfortunately, and it tends to gobble up our attention, time, and money.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Otis Gospodnetić, co-author of Lucene in Action and founder...

DevOps is all about removing barriers to rapid, safe delivery of new experiences to your customers. Much of this revolves around automating error-prone, human-driven processes so that processes can be standardized, scaled, and varied programmatically. Some of the types of tools used in a DevOps-minded organization might include version control systems, automation servers, and configuration management systems. Many tools can be used across categories, with varying amounts of success. Some vendors...

It’s inevitable that web application problems are going to happen. Here at Neotys, our business is based on helping you prevent problems through website monitoring and testing. But problems can come from anywhere, and sometimes you just need to know where to look. So we decided to put together a short guide on some of the most common performance issues you’ll encounter.
Now, it's important to remember that the best way to address performance problems is to find and eliminate them before they af...

Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture.
Logstash is an open source tool for managing events and logs. It is used to collect, search and store logs for later use. If you are using Logstash to collect logs from across your infrastructure already, and you are looking for more sophisticated ...

Over the last couple of years I have talked to numerous enterprise customers, analysts, industry pundits, and others interested in cloud technologies, and one thing is abundantly clear – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) seems to mean different things to different people. But the term PaaS is irrelevant – it's just noise. What is relevant, and what is important, is what PaaS does: enable applications. That's what enterprises care about. They want to accelerate application development to get products ...

I recently had the opportunity to attend UI19 in Boston, a long-running conference focused on user experience design and ways to be more effective in a UX role as part of a larger team. One of the presentations in particular stuck with me as I returned to Boulder thinking about VictorOps and our evolution as an early stage startup.
Presented by Kim Goodwin, her talk on Principles, Values, and Effective Design Teams touched on a number of challenges we’ve experienced first-hand here at VictorO...

These are some the Key Release Management Metrics our clients use to continually tune their release management process.
1. Number of Changes pending future system releases (Backlog)
2. Number of Successful Changes within a Release
3. Number of Failed Changes in a Release (Percentage of Failed Changes)
4. Number of Outages Caused by a Release
5. Number of Incidents Caused by a Release

Thanks to Docker, it becomes very easy to leverage containers to build, ship, and run any Linux application on any kind of infrastructure. Docker is particularly helpful for microservice architectures because their successful implementation relies on a fast, efficient deployment mechanism – which is precisely one of the features of Docker.
Microservice architectures are therefore becoming more popular, and are increasingly seen as an interesting option even for smaller projects, instead of bein...

Security can create serious friction for DevOps processes. We've come up with an approach to alleviate the friction and provide security value to DevOps teams.
In her session at DevOps Summit, Shannon Lietz, Senior Manager of DevSecOps at Intuit, will discuss how DevSecOps got started and how it has evolved.
Shannon Lietz has over two decades of experience pursuing next generation security solutions. She is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driv...

In his session at DevOps Summit, Tapabrata Pal, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Capital One, will tell a story about how Capital One has embraced Agile and DevOps Security practices across the Enterprise – driven by Enterprise Architecture; bringing in Development, Operations and Information Security organizations together. Capital Ones DevOpsSec practice is based upon three "pillars" – Shift-Left, Automate Everything, Dashboard Everything. Within about three years, from 100% waterfall, C...

It’s become easy to monitor applications that are deployed on hundreds of servers – thanks to the advances in application performance management tools. But the more data you collect the harder it is to visualize the health state in a way that a single dashboard tells you both the overall status as well as the problematic component.
Eugene Turetsky (Dynatrace) and Stephan Levesque (SSQ Financial Group) shared their solution for monitoring large IT infrastructures that contain several hundred com...

DevOps was created to reduce many of these same conflicts and while DevOps has had several high-profile successes it still presents a challenge for larger organizations. Large enterprises managing mission-critical systems still have separate silos for development and operations. In this post I discuss how DevOps fits into the enterprise and what release managers can do to adapt and extend DevOps to meet the challenges present in larger businesses.
First, I’m going to define DevOps. Then I’m goi...

Over on the other side of the fence IT ops are screaming at the various portfolio dev teams for releasing highly risky functionality way too frequently but since the Agile dev adoption production has only had a couple of low priority P4 incidents caused by bad code releases. Things must be looking good with the new dev process but then a few months down the track BAM a P1 incident the Monday morning after a agile delivered release is deployed. Highly important business functionality is broken in...

Welcome to my four-part series on what I’m going to call the Art of DevOps. We will embark on a mission to reveal the extremely valuable intelligence that’s been collected about a unique strategy to continuously deliver assets to the operational battleground safely, securely and quickly. This strategy drives optimal monitoring of the frontlines and enhanced communications with the troops supporting the initial development. I do make the assumption that most of you are battle-worthy veterans in o...

The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

The competition among public cloud providers is red hot, private cloud continues to grab increasing shares of IT budgets, and hybrid cloud strategies are beginning to conquer the enterprise IT world.

Big Data is driving dramatic leaps in resource requirements and capabilities, and now the Internet of Things promises an exponential leap in the size of the Internet and Worldwide Web.

The world of SDX now encompasses Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDCs) as the technology world prepares for the Zettabyte Age.

Add the key topics of WebRTC and DevOps into the mix, and you have three days of pure cloud computing that you simply cannot miss.

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